Maureen Dowd Sucks (Again)

I've been waiting for the Sunday Times since Tuesday evening around 8 PM (PST). Wasn't the first thing on my mind, certainly, but at some point I wanted to hear how Frank Rich, et al., reacted to Obama's victory.

Rich's main point is that we're a better country than we (and the Rovian Republicans) think we are. Thomas Friedman wants foreign leaders, giddy over an Obama victory, to remember to back Obama when things get tough: when we try to extricate ourselves from Iraq without collapsing the entire structure, or when we have to put pressure on Iran to keep them from developing nuclear weapons. Nicholas Kristof, echoing what I've long felt, wonders if Obama's victory is as much a victory for another embattled minority group, intellectuals, as it is for African-Americans.†

And Maureen Dowd? She begins her column not poorly:

I grew up in the nationís capital, but Iíve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week.

That made me want to read on. Until the very next sentence:

Everywhere I go, some white person is asking some black person how they feel.

I thought: Surely not everywhere you go. Surely there are white people in D.C. who realize how condescending that is. Surely there are white people in D.C. who are happy enough to bask in their own joy without probing into the joy of perfect strangers ó as if an Obama victory went beyond their ability to understand or experience. As if it wasn't for them as well.

But Ms. Dowd finds them. Or at least writes about them. A white customer quizzing his black waitress. White women quizzing their black bartender. A white-haired white woman and a UPS delivery guy. Dowd herself and her mailman. Each instance involves a black service-person and a white customer. Nice. Where does she live again? Maybe she needs to get out more. Or further.

And the point of her column? It comes in the second-to-last graf:

But is it time now for whites to stop polling blacks on their feelings?